Applications open for the 'world's coolest job'

If you devote more time to social media than your actual career, and have a hankering to see the world that your meagre annual leave simply cannot sate, we may have just found your ideal job.

A social media creative agency is recruiting an in-house photographer, whose full-time role will be to trot the globe on assignment. “Whether you’re dangling out of a helicopter to catch a hawk's-eye view of Hong Kong or swimming with whale sharks to capture the beauty of the Philippines, you’ll travel around the world to bring stories to life for global clients,” says the job ad.

“Simply put, you’ll celebrate the beauty of the world and tell its stories of amazing people, places and experiences.”

The vacancy is with Beautiful Destinations, which describes itself as “an award-winning creative agency behind the largest travel and lifestyle community on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat”. According to the job description, they work with the likes of Fairmont Hotels and The Luxury Collection, and have more than 12 million social media followers in 180 countries.

So far, so good – so what’s the pay packet? “Our content creators receive competitive salaries with health benefits,” says the advert, but without mention of an actual figure. Nick Schweers, from the company's press office, said: “The salary is competitive based on experience; however, I'm unable to provide a hard number.”

The Beautiful Destinations website contains little info about the company. There’s a tiny section listing the agency's impressive social media reach, but no information about how it works with these prestigious brands, no testimonials, no business address. It’s chock-full of gorgeous travel photos, and tantalising descriptions of “the coolest job in the world” – but details about the business are scant.

“We separate our B2B side from consumers on social media, which is why there's little information about the agency on any of our social media platforms,” said Schweers. “Our social platforms serve to inspire travel and celebrate the beauty of the world, not promote our creative services, the source of our revenue.”

Schweers explained: “The Beautiful Destinations team creates 'social first' content for some of the world's best brands, governments and NGOs, helping them generate a return on social media through predictive visual analytics and storytelling.” This is marketing for the Millennial generation, eschewing traditional publicity methods in favour of posting content on social media.

In order to apply for the job, you have to follow Beautiful Destinations on both Instagram and YouTube, and tag @beautifuldestinations and #BDTeam in “a new, original photo or video” on Instagram.

According to Schweers, the vacancy (which opened at the start of October and closes on November 30) has had 40,000 applications so far (so your pitch had better be a good one).

“We took a social media approach to promote the job openings because our thought process was, 'what better way to find "social first" photographers than on social media?' We knew the quality of applicants would be much more up to par than if we had posted on traditional job listing websites.”

“Not only did Entrepreneur just name us one of the top 360 small companies in their Entrepreneur 360 List last week, we're also a finalist for Most Innovative Agency in the Digiday Awards,” said Schweers. “We just hosted India's largest InstaMeet ever with 20+ of the top creatives around the world last week with partners The Luxury Collection and ITC Hotels.”

The world’s greatest job, or too good to be true? We’ll let you decide.